Datasheet

INSTALLING SP1

your C: drive is low on free space but your E: drive has 400MB free, you could tell the SP1 installer

to put the RTM backups in a folder named e:\rtmbackups, along with the other options that we

used in the last example, like so:

sp1 /d:e:\rtmbackups /forcerestart /passive /o /f

You needn’t even create the e:\rtmbackups directory; the SP1 installer will do it for you.

Preunpacking SP1 with the /x Option

Consider this scenario: you need to put SP1 on a number of servers, but for some reason don’t want

to use WSUS or Microsoft Update. So you burn sp1.exe onto a CD-ROM disc and walk it around

your servers. After installing SP1 on a couple of servers, you notice that every time you pop that

disc into a server’s drive and start up SP1, you have to spend 10 minutes twiddling your thumbs

while sp1.exe unpacks itself. You could save time, you reason, if you could first unpack the whole

thing, converting it from one big EXE file to a folder full of files, and then burn that folder to a

CD-ROM. Then—somehow—you’d figure out how to get all of those SP1 files to install themselves.

Once you figure that out, you could walk that CD-ROM around to your remaining servers, saving

precious time on the SP1 install. But how to unpack sp1.exe? With the -x option. Just type

sp1 -x:path

Where path is a drive and folder name, like sp1 -x:d:\unpackedsp1files. That causes

sp1.exe to create the d:\unpackedsp1files folder if it’s not already created, and to put a folder

inside that one called i386. (If you alternatively leave the :path off the option and just type a simple

-x, then sp1.exe will prompt you for a location to save the unpacked files to.) The resulting folder

contains about 413MB of files and folders. Inside i386 is a folder called update that contains a few

files, one of which is named update.exe, and it’s the program that we’d use to tell this already-

unpacked copy of SP1 to install itself. And controlling update.exe is easy—it uses the exact same

options as sp1.exe does. So, for example, suppose I’d unpacked SP1 to some folder on my hard

disk, and then took the resulting i386 folder and burned it to a CD-ROM disc. Then suppose I pop

that disc into the CD-ROM drive of one of my servers, and that the CD-ROM’s drive letter is D:. I

could then start up an SP1 install that skipped backups, showed the progress bar, and automati-

cally rebooted despite apps with open files. To do this, I’d type

d:\i386\update\update.exe /n /passive /forcerestart

Uninstalling SP1

As I’ve said, I’ve never had the occasion to uninstall SP1. But if you do, then as far as I can see there’s

only one way to do it—with the SP1 installer program and the /uninstall option. Just type

sp1 /uninstall

And in a few minutes, you’ll be back to RTM-ness. When uninstalling, SP1 will accept the

/forcerestart, /passive, /quiet, and /f options. (And by the way, if you’ve been avoiding the

command line so far, then in this case resistance is futile; there’s no choice!)

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